a collection of words about God and life and art and baseball and football and hope and my family and my ministry and music and the immense joy in each moment of all of it. it's a record of being human. welcome.

Search This Blog

time to change

Labels

Comments

Anonymous said…

Praying for you and your family as you go thru the changes and move. Thanks for the video. Brought back memories and had to add it to our church's website. I was looking for something else, and this was perfect.

Popular posts from this blog

i made these comments and prayed the following prayer at one of our worship services at SPWF yesterday, and had a few folks asked if i would post them, so there they are: It has been a season of terrible
tragedy. And I have noticed in the news
a trending phrase: thoughts and prayers.
It even has its own hashtag on twitter and other social media, but net
necessarily in a good way. People are
understandably tired of hearing about others’ thoughts and prayers, when that
is only a thinly-veiled way of saying that our only obligation to those who
suffer is a brief moment of silence, or nothing more than a tweet or public
statement. The truth is that, for those
of us who follow Jesus, much is required when our neighbors suffer. We are called to do justice where we can, to
love kindness and mercy, and to walk with God through it all. But let us be careful not to throw out the
proverbial baby with the bathwater. We
are, as people of faith, those who know that prayer is not simply an em…

there is a tree in my back yard. i'm pretty sure it's an oak tree. at least that's what i think Shannon told me. i don't know my oaks from my maples, my elms from my locusts. to me, it's a tree: a corinthian column bursting up into life and glory. full of sap and pulp and rings and bugs and cells pulsing with water and always reaching for something. it is full of rhythm, reach and flourish then fall and die, and repeat.

this particular tree, though, isn't of one mind.

half of it's rusted orange leaves have given up their grip and surrendered -gracefully or not - to the pull of gravity and the threat of winter. the north side of this inauspicious oak is just about bare naked, all sticks and straight lines, a skeleton of itself. but the side that looks south is stubbornly resisting change. no longer green, the leaves have compromised their summer vibrancy, but they are clearly not ready to concede death just yet.

i'm not sure how many americans right now are feeling optimistic about the government. i know i'm not. in fact, while i didn't live through the civil war or anything, i have to think that faith in our elected leaders - indeed the whole system of electing them in the first place - is at one of its lowest points. i just don't have a great deal of confidence in those individuals who have been elected, or in those who want to be. i find myself slipping at times into what feels like a swamp of apathy: sinking, to be sure, but not sure that i care enough anymore to do much about it. i see this attitude all around me: in conversations, on social media, and in popular culture. perhaps there is no more clear indication of our nation's view of the government than this current election season, when we would teeter on electing liars and thieves, crooks and clowns.

which is why i was so startled as i sat down to read psalm 72 this morning. as i read the ancient song, i…